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Hillary Clinton: Kavanaugh's revenge claim deserves 'laughter'

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded with laughter to
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's statement that she and her
husband, former President Bill Clinton, played a roll in sexual assault
allegations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford.
Speaking Tuesday at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., Clinton
responded to Kavanaugh's claim that the accusations and the ensuing
hearing were part of "a calculated and orchestrated political hit"
fueled by "revenge on behalf of the Clintons," the result of the 2016
election and other factors.

"It deserves a lot of laughter," Clinton said. "I thought it was just
part of the whole -- of his very defensive and unconvincing
presentation. And I told someone later, 'Boy, I will tell you -- they
give us a lot of credit -- 36 years ago, we started this against him."

Kavanaugh testified last week on allegations he sexually assaulted Ford at a house party when the two were teenagers in 1982.

Clinton added she couldn't recall any nominee "behaving in such a way"
during Senate testimony, also drawing on her own experiences testifying
before the Senate about her email use and about the death of four
Americans in a Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in
Benghazi, Libya.

"We have not seen anything quiet like that for a long time ... in this
case, the performance, the behavior was quite out of bounds. I don't
ever remember anything like that," she said.

Conversely, Clinton said she found Ford's testimony to be "very credible" and praised her demeanor.

"You have ask yourself why would anybody put themselves through this if
they did not believe that they had important information to convey to
the Senate," she said. "I found her presentation, I found her
willingness to say 'I don't remember that but I remember this' to be
very convincing and I felt a great swell of pride that she would be
willing to put herself out there under these circumstances."

Clinton also discussed election interference in the upcoming midterm
election, saying she doesn't believe the Trump administration and U.S.
agencies are doing enough to prevent influence by foreign actors and
theft of information.

"This is the kind of general threat -- this attack on our nation -- that
should be taken seriously by everybody and should be the No. 1 issue on
our national security headline right now," she said.

She added she believes such interference by Russia and other factors had
an impact on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

"I believe that the combination of the Russian campaign, WikiLeaks being
the cutout for Russian information, the role Cambridge Analytica and
other organizations like that played, in connection with the Republican
apparatus, the national committee and other allies and the Trump
campaign certainly altered the outcome in enough places that we have to
ask what really happened," she said.

Earlier in the day, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., spoke at the event,
telling attendees he plans to remain in politics after his term in the
Senate ends. He announced last year he wouldn't seek re-election in
2018.

"I'm not leaving the Senate because I'm not tied to this institution or
'pox on all your houses,'" Flake said. "It's a wonderful institution
with wonderful people.

"I simply couldn't run the kind of campaign that I felt I needed to run
in this environment and succeed," he added. "That's the bottom line. But
I will stay involved, certainly. I don't know at what level or in what
way but this is important."

Speaking alongside Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., Flake said he was "troubled by the tone of the remarks" by Kavanaugh last week.

"The initial defense that Judge Kavanaugh gave was something like, I
told my wife: 'I hope that I sound that indignant if I was unjustly
maligned,'" Flake said. "But then it went on, and the interaction with
the members was sharp and partisan and that concerns me."

Flake was instrumental in forcing an FBI investigation into the
allegations when he said he wouldn't vote in favor of Kavanaugh's
nomination in the full Senate unless there was a probe.